In an Internet environment, digital certificates are commonly used to authenticate communications between devices. The digital certificates authenticate a sender of the communications and also typically include a public key used to decrypt a received communication.
The digital certificates are generally provisioned for a fixed period of time, for example one or two years. Once the fixed period of time expires, the digital certificates are no longer valid. Management of digital certificates is needed to ensure that the digital certificates remain valid as long as they are needed and are renewed before they expire.